It is now over two decades since a cluster of studies by Natalie Zemon Davis, Bob Scribner, Marc Venard, Roger Chartier, Richard Trexler, William Christian, Carlo Ginzburg and others significantly modified our ways of thinking about religion in early modern Europe and in particular about the relationship between ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ religion, or as many had conceived it, between religion as preached and religion as practised. It had been simpler when writers who thought about such things had drawn neat boundaries between elite and popular and regarded communication between them as an exclusively one-way, top-down, process. They had also tended to regard the popular aspect of the polarity as qualitatively inferior to its elite corollary, depicting it variously as instrumental, functional, un-spiritual, somatic, irrational, unreflective, mechanical, amoral, magical or superstitious, or indeed as all of these things together, as if ‘the people’, a group generally defined in class terms as the socially subordinate, exhibited a vast collective unconscious. Additionally, much ethnography had taken such a divide as axiomatic, the German Volkskunde tradition, for example, often positing a process of transmission or ‘sinking’ of cultural forms from the elite down to the popular level. Such assumptions, which moreover uncritically reflected a notion of ‘religion’ which is restricted to a formal doctrinal corpus, defined and authenticated by the very body charged with its maintenance, were damaged by the historical revolution of the 1970s and 1980s and will not do for most scholars now, despite having informed a number of still influential historical schemata.

The curious career of ‘Martin Marprelate, gentleman’ is one of the most notorious and at the same time elusive episodes in the history of English puritanism, inspiring endless if largely futile speculation into the identity of its author. Part literary canard, part political scandal, part detective story, for around a calendar year between October 1588 and September 1589, Martin and his associates kept one step ahead of the pursuivants and produced seven scurrilous tracts aimed at the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Adding spice to the story, their main targets, John Whitgift, archbishop of Canterbury, and John Aylmer, bishop of London, were also the officers empowered by the Star Chamber in 1586 both to examine religious dissidents and to supervise the press. To keep up his cottage industry of satire and vilification, Marprelate moved his printing press from county to county (from Surrey to Northamptonshire to Warwickshire to Lancashire), from private dwelling to private dwelling, and turned the failure of his pursuers into further occasion for ridicule, insult, and his own popular triumph over adversity. Like a will o’ the wisp, he could disappear into the bushes and then emerge in a printed book whenever he wanted. Even after the main part of the operation was broken up and the typeface destroyed, he managed to get out one final tractlet as a last snook at the authorities. And then, whereas the printmen were examined and tortured, and Whitgift went after the more serious elements of the presbyterian cause with relentless violence, Martin himself escaped entirely.

In 1648 the creole elite of Mexico City was enthralled to learn that in December 1531 the Virgin Mary had appeared to a poor Indian and had miraculously imprinted on his cape the likeness of herself, which was still venerated in the chapel at Tepeyac just outside the city limits. The moment was opportune, since in 1622 Archbishop Juan Pérez de la Serna had completed the construction of a new sanctuary devoted to Our Lady of Guadalupe and in 1629 the image had been brought to the cathedral in a vain attempt to lower the flood waters that engulfed the capital for four years. In effect, Image of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God of Guadalupe (1648) was a heartfelt response to the growth in devotion to the Mexican Virgin; and its author, Miguel Sánchez, wrote as if inspired by a particular revelation, since his only guides were oral tradition and the stimulus of other apparition narratives. A creole priest, renowned for his piety, patriotism and great learning, Sánchez appears to have modelled his account on Murillo’s history of Our Lady of Pilar and her apparition at Zaragoza to St James, which is to say, to Santiago, the patron saint of Spain.

Can we identify a pre-eminent physical location for the encounter between elite and popular religious mentalities in seventeenth-century England? A once fashionable and almost typological identification of ‘elite’ with the Church, and ‘popular’ with the alehouse, is now qualified or rejected by many historians. But there has been growing scholarly interest in a third, less salubrious, locale: the prison. Here, throughout the century and beyond, convicted felons of usually low social status found themselves the objects of concern and attention from educated ministers, whose declared purpose was to bring them to full and public repentance for their crimes. The transcript of this process is to be found in a particular literary source: the murder pamphlet, at least 350 of which were published in England between 1573 and 1700. The last two decades have witnessed a mini-explosion of murder-pamphlet studies, as historians and literary scholars alike have become aware of the potential of ‘cheap print’ for addressing a range of questions about the culture and politics of early modern England. The social historian James Sharpe has led the way here, in an influential article characterizing penitent declarations from the scaffold in Foucauldian terms, as internalizations of obedience to the state. In a series of studies, Peter Lake has argued that the sensationalist accounts of ‘true crime’ which were the pamphlets’ stock-in-trade also allowed space for the doctrines of providence and predestination, providing Protestant authors with an entry point into the mental world of the people.

There is a general acceptance amongst historians of English Catholicism in the Early Modern period that Catholic landlords were paternalistic towards their tenants, that they were generally in turns charitable and controing, their behaviour invasive yet motivated by a desire for religious and social harmony within the manor. Early modern English Catholicism was certainly seigneurial, with a requirement by the landlord, as suggested by John Bossy, to pay attention to the tenants’ well-being and ‘also to their faith and morals’.’ Michael Mullett echoes these sentiments with regard to late eighteenth-century Catholics who relied ‘on the kind hearts of those who wore the coronets’. The idea of Catholic paternalism is also endorsed by several social and economic historians, such as James M. Rosenheim, who wrote with regard to Lancashire, ‘[the] Roman Catholic gentry sustained closer connections with local communities than did aristocrats elsewhere’. This paper will examine the issue of paternalism on Catholic estates and in the local community to show that the Catholic elite, like their non-Catholic counterparts, gave money to the poor and established schools and almshouses. The focus of this philanthropy, however, was on other Catholics. The Catholic elite were also able to help their tenants, who were usually Catholic, and tie them more closely to the estate by not rack-renting their property and by not hiding behind estate stewards. There were two main reasons for the Catholic elite to focus their efforts on their poorer brethren: without the help of the Catholic elite in providing chapels and relief, Catholicism in England would have floundered; the Catholic elite were also

Joseph Arch, the agricultural trade unionist, was born in 1826 at Barford in south Warwickshire. In his autobiography, he recalled, as a boy, witnessing the Eucharist in the village church:

vowed Arch.

Parish churches during the ‘long eighteenth century’ were meeting places for the whole community, elite and popular. Accommodating the hierarchically ordered and theologically aware society of England and Wales in church was not a simple matter. How might the elite and the popular, the squire and his relations, and his groom, and boot boy and the milk maid, and aspiring farmers and attorneys and their wives and sisters and cousins and aunts, along with day labourers and paupers, be included together as the body of Christ before God? People were sensitive about their social stratification.

This essay will argue that in eighteenth-century Geneva the religion of most of the lay elite followed the French pattern: learning and fashion alike steered them to a relaxed attitude to religious practice, and a mildly sceptical view of doctrine. It will be shown, however, that Geneva’s clergy – not securely within the elite -often tried to resist any softening of Geneva’s strict rules and social constraints even when they were keen to embrace scientific enlightenment; further, no overarching account of popular religion in Geneva can convincingly be propounded. One reason for this is that Geneva’s popular classes, unlike those of France, were dominated by literate, prosperous townspeople, many of whom still self-consciously lived out their protestant heritage, but some of whom found more meaning in radical, almost-secular politics.

Both the study of popular religion and popular culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries suffer from a number of methodological and definitional problems. Historians of religion often assume that popular religion is synonymous with superstitious beliefs that have little or no relation to confessional orthodoxy. It is further claimed that during the nineteenth century superstition was abandoned as a consequence of the modernization of society and the imposition of respectable behaviour. Complementing this tendency, historians of popular culture in this period have generally ignored the religious aspects of everyday life and describe culture primarily in secular terms. This has much to do with the tendency to adopt, consciously or otherwise, a world-view that automatically assumes the subservience of religion to culture in the modern world. According to this view, once the events of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution had cast their spell, organized religion and personal religious faith were jettisoned, often in favour of the nebulous term ‘culture’, and a wedge driven between the sacred and secular. Given the overwhelming amount of evidence to the contrary, it is obvious that this tendency significantly hinders our understanding of the everyday lives and thoughts of our ancestors, especially in the Irish and specifically Ulster context where religion still has an importance that some fail to credit with sufficient patience, let alone understanding. As a result of these problems, the study of popular religion in the modern period lags well behind the advances made by historians of religion in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe.

When identifying the ‘catalyst for disaffection’ and the ‘trigger for individual secessions’ from the Establishment in the early nineteenth century, Grayson Carter recently concluded that ‘theological “extremism” was probably a more significant irritant than pastoral exasperation’. It is nevertheless evident that episcopal restraints on any ecclesiastical ‘irregularities’ and the dubious spiritual credentials of some of those controlling the appointment of both higher and lower clergy were also significant factors in the discontent of many who seceded in the 1830s. A quest for freedom from such constraints therefore often accompanied the special doctrinal emphases of those who would sooner or later quit the establishment. This was particularly true of the seceders known as the Plymouth Brethren whose congregations proliferated in the 1830s and ‘40s. With clerical ordination abandoned as unscriptural, their meetings came to be noted for spontaneous prayer and exhortation by any member of the congregation, but such an ‘institutionalizing’ of unprogrammed participation was liable to attract ‘free spirits’ whose orthodoxy and ‘manners’ could be questionable. This paper considers the way in which the precise doctrinal convictions and conservative social assumptions of such seceders could come into conflict with, and sometimes, at least for a while, keep at bay some of the elements unleashed by their professed desire for ecclesiastical freedom. Of particular interest is the interplay of social and doctrinal motivation.

Popular and elite are imprecise terms, but it may be possible to give them a closer definition by relating them to categories in the work of John Henry Newman. In 1877, Newman was growing old. He was republishing his Anglican writings, both to preserve what they contained of value and to draw what poison remained. A particular difficulty attached to his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, published forty years before, in 1837, which classically defined the peculiar merit of the Church of England as occupying a middle way or via media between Romanism and popular Protestantism. The work contained some sharp attacks on Rome, which Newman had retracted even before his Roman conversion. There remained, however, a particular matter which had long been an obstacle to his submission to Rome, his conviction that the honours which Roman Catholics paid to the Virgin and saints derogated from the unique worship due to Christ, which Newman combined with a fastidious distaste for the more ‘unmanly’ and sentimental or sugary aspects of modern Catholic devotion.

In December 1853 Horace Mann, summing up his report on the census of religious worship conducted on 30 March 1851, offered some of the more famously sweeping generalizations in English religious and statistical history:

Among the signal insights of twentieth-century scholarship was the recognition that early Christianity accorded personal importance to the plebs. First, Eric Auerbach analysed the humble speech forms of early Christianity, contrasting them with the literature of learned pagans. The point was developed by Ramsay MacMullen in an important essay entitled ‘Sermo humilis’. Arnaldo Momigliano applied these insights to the theologians, historians and hagiographers of the fourth and fifth centuries. He showed how Augustine, Jerome, Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret of Cyr succeeded, as pagan intellectuals had not succeeded, in ‘abolishing the internal frontiers between the learned and the vulgar’. Finally, Peter Brown, in a series of brilliant works from The Cult of the Saints to his revised biography of Augustine, supplied a means of discerning in the practice of universal baptism the ‘antidote’ to the exaggerations of fourth-century ascetical elitism. Augustine imparted to the Western Middle Ages a confidence in the power of sacramental grace as efficacious not only for the ascetic few, but as communicating to the many a capacity for growth in charity, purity, and prayer. Such a perspective on the religion of the many bids adieu to Gibbon’s story of ‘philosophy’ collapsing into ‘barbarism and religion’; to Hume’s account of the superstitious and the credulous; and to Henry Hart Milman’s Romantic brand of Liberal Anglicanism as marked by ‘condescension’ towards ‘popular religion’ occluding ‘the thought processes of the average man’; a habit of mind to which Peter Brown surprisingly appended the name of Newman.

Christ Church United Reformed Church (formerly Congregational), Port Sunlight, and St George’s United Reformed Church (formerly Congregational), Thornton Hough, do not spring to mind as Free Church buildings. There is scarcely one architectural respect in which either announces a Dissenting presence. Each conforms to nationally established tradition. Their quality, however, is as incontestable as it is incontestably derivative. Their role in their respective village-scapes is important, even dominant. As buildings, therefore, they are significant and perhaps suggestive, but do they say anything about ecclesiastical polity? The answer to that question illustrates the interaction between elite and popular religion in Edwardian English Protestant Nonconformity, for the polity to which these two churches give space is in fact successively congregational, Congregational, and Reformed. It is representative throughout but never democratic. Yet can any shade of Congregationalism truly develop in either a squire’s village or a manufacturer’s? And what might be deduced of the man who provided these buildings, created their villages, shaped their communities, and regarded himself lifelong as a Congregationalist even if a masonic lodge were the only fellowship to which he could statedly commit himself? These questions prompt this paper.

Despite relatively low working-class church attendance over the nineteenth century, evidence of religious practice in working-class households and a more diffuse religious mentality have been identified by historians, even until the mid or late twentieth century. Yet little analysis has been undertaken into how such a mentality was created. While Cox noted of late nineteenth- century Lambeth that the most successful churches were those which contained vast philanthropic networks, elsewhere he claimed that ‘philanthropy … did little to promote definite Christian belief. Indeed, both he and Williams regarded schools as the primary agency for conveying religious teaching: Cox claiming that Board schools were more effective than Sunday schools, Williams, that Sunday schools provided not only a means of instilling religious belief in children but a form of ‘religion by deputy’ for their parents.

Although it is commonly asserted that Protestantism bears an intrinsic antagonism toward images, this claim is manifestly, contradicted by a long history of the production and use of images among Protestants the world over. At the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, British organizations such as Hannah More’s Cheap Repository and the Religious Tract Society, and a host of tract and Sunday school societies formed in the United States, all made zealous use of illustrated tracts, handbills, broadsides, newspapers, magazines and books in order to address the disparity between the small number of evangelists and the vast number of those requiring evangelization. Founded in 1825, the American Tract Society invested unprecedented sums in materials and technology to illustrate its tracts and children’s literature and attracted the best wood engraver in the United States to do so. British and American tract producers explicitly felt that illustrations were a strong form of appeal to children and the semi-literate, such as immigrants and the poor. And they happily relied on images in urban settings to compete with secular advertisements and the rival trade of books and pamphlet sellers.

The use of popular styles of music in the Church has often proved contentious, and perhaps particularly so in the later twentieth century. Anecdotal evidence abounds of the debate provoked in churches by the introduction of new ‘happy-clappy’ pop-influenced styles, and the supposed wholesale discarding of a glorious heritage of hymnody. In addition, a great deal of literature has appeared elaborating on the inappropriateness of such music. Welcoming a historical study of hymnody in 1996, John Habgood lamented the displacement of traditional hymn singing by ‘trivial and repetitive choruses’. Lionel Dakers, retired Director of the Royal School of Church Music, also saw choruses and worship songs as ‘in many instances little more than trite phrases repeated ad nauseam, often with accompanying body movements’. This paper investigates the reactions of the musical and ecclesiastical establishments to the use of popular music in public worship in the Church of England from 1956 to c. 1990. The period began with a new wave of experimentation epitomized by Geoffrey Beaumont’s Folk Mass and the controversy surrounding it, and ended in the early 1990s, by which time the pop-influenced worship music of the renewal movement had become firmly established in some sections of the Church, with its own figure-heads and momentum.